The present invention relates generally to a method for generating sales offers to customers and, in particular, to an apparatus and method for using customer equipment remote monitoring to generate automated product sales offers to the associated customer.
A business generates sales leads for a product that matches customer needs typically by relying upon customer feedback information gathered and analyzed manually by service technicians, sales persons, account managers and others during direct contact opportunities with current or prospective customers and their equipment. A customer equipment survey is one example of a manual method used currently to help determine opportunities to solicit a sale of a product to a customer. Information gathered from the survey allows the sales organization to assess the state of the customers' equipment and its operating environment. This survey information can be used to match up products that best fit and may be of most interest to the specific customer. Surveys, however, often have the disadvantage of being time-consuming and burdensome to the customer. Surveys also have the disadvantage that the customer may inadvertently provide erroneous or misleading data. Additionally, even the best survey may be flawed, and surveys also take a great deal of time to prepare, conduct and analyze.
Enterprise-wide information database systems are also becoming more common as businesses seek to centralize their data storage and retrieval needs. These database systems typically contain data on customers, products offered for sale, past sales figures, past customer purchases, and inventory on hand, among others. These database systems are utilized to maintain a single storage area for these various types of company-wide data.
In many industries, for example in the elevator service industry, service organizations are being used to maintain their customers' equipment. The U.S. Pat. No. 4,771,865 shows a system that manages multiple elevator installations remotely. The system monitors multiple elevator systems, gathers data, and ultimately transmits the data to a regional exchange to store the data for later analysis or planning. More frequently, these service organizations have been utilizing this type of system to help the service organization maintain and service the equipment being monitored for the customer, and to help improve service productivity. The monitored information is typically parametric data, such as functional, performance, and environmental data. The monitored data is typically transmitted to a central monitoring system and database. These systems for the remote management of elevator installations are well known and allow multiple locations located remotely from each other to be monitored by the central management system.
The amount of data that is monitored, gathered, and stored by these remote management systems can be quite substantial. This data is currently being used only for maintenance management of monitored systems. No method exists in the prior art for utilizing this data, which is a customer's actual use of the monitored equipment, as the basis for generating product sales offers.
It is desirable to have the ability to generate sales offers to customers without the use of surveys or assessments that require manual input from the customer.
It is desirable to utilize the data already being gathered by the remote monitoring systems to generate sales offers to the customers whose equipment is being monitored.
It is desirable to combine the data from a remote monitoring system with data from an enterprise-wide information database system to generate sales offers to customers. It is also desirable to utilize data remotely gathered from monitored equipment and compare the gathered data with customer criteria in order to provide the customer with sales offers based on the performance of the monitored equipment.
It is an object of the invention, therefore, to utilize the data already being gathered by a customer equipment remote monitoring system to generate sales offers to existing customers based on the actual use of their monitored equipment.